I am usually not impressed by the observations of the universe as it becomes common place in time. If this new data is actually true, it is beyond freakish and can hardly be believed. A slashdot article indicates there is a huge reservoir of water circling and being consumed by a black hole 12 billion light years away. Thus it is 12 billion years in the past and about 1026 meters away. The link to NASA article is here, and I have not looked at the data yet, but that is really odd.

ADDED: I looked at the data and it is hard to explain in any other way. The emission and absorption spectrum in all wavelengths is very specific and is the basis of infrared spectroscopy, which I recently recursed in biochemistry lab using salt disks. It is not hard to imagine that given an ocean with carbon and energy and radiation, that it would produce something and the presence of CO is another teller. It is a simple thing to consider the cooling of gas and see which compounds form first in the sequence and how they would combine. The CN and CO imply a sequence of combination that is likely and the existence of amino acids in space is a direct result of that. Considering that we are looking into the past 12 billion years, what sort of PC's do they have if Moore's Law holds. I would like to use a PC with 212000000000 compute power.

ADDED MORE: After some thought is likely that there are several models that could fit the data as what is seen is only a very small angle of capture at that distance and I am reminded of the "canals of Mars" and little green men. Chemical composition and interaction proceeds virtually like a machine in its specificity and product. Hydrogen and Oxygen do not produce fish or dogs , they produce water when associated always. The same is true in the lab when reagents are known and pure. It is repeatable. It is reasonable to assume that the generalized process of super nova, heavy atoms and their mixture follows a fairly predictable progress. It is reasonable to assume that life existed billions of years before Earth even formed. It is even reasonable to assume a similar appearance due to the fact that DNA has modes of operation and transition which interact with the environment to select for specific sequences. A land based life would not likely be the most common evolutionary result.